Welcome to the January edition of Not a Newsletter, a monthly, semi-comprehensive, Google Doc-based guide to sending better emails! I’m Dan, the founder of Inbox Collective, an email consultancy, and the former Director of Newsletters at The New Yorker and BuzzFeed. Every month, I update this doc with email news, tips, and ideas. Sign up here to be notified when the next edition goes live!
Inside this issue, you’ll find 33 strategies to retain paying subscribers; a few links about the importance of doing stuff that doesn’t scale; a big update on Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection; several new tools that might help you convert readers from Twitter, publish newsletters via WordPress, and drive increased conversion/retention among subscribers; and more!
Want to read a previous edition of Not a Newsletter? Find the full archive at this link.
-Dan
This Month in Email Headlines
- Constant Contact To Acquire Australian SMS, Email Platform Vision6 (MediaPost)
- Axios Pro Deal Newsletters Launch, Starting at $599 Annually (Adweek)
- Puck expands media vertical (Axios)
- How Insider’s first-party data offering grew in 2021 (Digiday)
- A Pop Star Becomes a Guru (The New York Times)
A Brief Word of Thanks
A few years ago, I saw the singer-songwriter Todd Snider perform in New York, and he told a story about his very first album. There are some good songs on it, but there’s one — the last track, “Talkin’ Seattle Grunge Rock Blues” — that got decent airplay. It’s about a fictional ‘90s band that moves to Seattle and tries to stand out in the grunge scene by refusing to play music on stage. (“We called it silence,” Snider sings. “Music’s original alternative.”) The song is weird and funny and a total rip-off of Bob Dylan, but it was a hit with indie stations and on college radio. When he told the story of that song that one night in New York, Snider admitted, “I don’t think I would have gotten to do about half the stuff I’ve done in my life if I hadn’t written down those lyrics.”
Life is funny like that. In January 2019, I decided to publish this Google Doc for the first time. I’d had some success with public Google Docs before, as had some colleagues and friends in the news space, like Millie Tran (who’s “What Am I Going to Do With My Life???” doc is still so wonderful) and Annemarie Dooling, who’d had great success with using docs as an internal communications tool. I hoped my Google Doc might give me a space to share what I’d learned and to help me meet new folks in the email world. But I never expected it to grow into the resource and the community that it has.
Publishing Not a Newsletter gave me the opportunity to start Inbox Collective, and to work with dozens (soon to be in the hundreds!) of publishers, non-profits, and creators over the past three years. I would not be doing this work without Not a Newsletter, and without you, the readers who’ve supported it and shared it with your colleagues and friends. Three years and 36 issues later, it is still such a privilege to get the chance to write for you.
So as we start the new year, I want to say again: Thanks for reading, and here’s to doing great work with newsletters in the year ahead.
-Dan
For Your Reading / To-Do List
- Last month, I gave a talk to INMA members about 33 strategies to retain a paying subscriber. If you’re an INMA member, you can read through each of the strategies here. (And if you’re not, email me at dan@inboxcollective.com — I’d be happy to share the slides with your org!)
- Loved this, from CJ Chilvers, who published his first newsletter way back in 1987: 35 lessons from 35 years in newsletters.
- And I’ll quote one of the best lessons here, because I couldn’t say it any better myself:
20. Subject lines don’t matter anywhere near as much as your From line. Trust is the only thing that improves your From line.
- Aleyda Solis, an SEO consultant who runs the #SEOFOMO newsletter, wrote about how she grew her audience from 1,750 subscribers to more than 17,000 subscribers in two years. (You’ll note that there are plenty of growth tips in here — but one of the more important steps she took was focusing on a consistent format + sending frequency. If readers know what they’ll get and when they’ll get it, they’ll be far more likely to sign up.)
- On the Newspack blog, Katie Hawkins-Gaar profiled Voice of OC, a non-profit newsroom in California that’s doing great work. This one section, in particular, caught my eye:
Instead of launching a big survey for donors about their motivations, Quick started by asking each new donor — one by one. Whenever a new reader would become a recurring Voice of OC donor, Quick would follow up with an email asking what prompted them to give.
“I started by sending that note only to new recurring donors, and it was so successful that I now send it to every single donor,” Quick explained.
“People give us really thoughtful responses about why they donate to us,” she added. Quick and team have used those testimonials in future fundraising emails and reusable blocks on the website. “It’s so efficient,” she said.
- I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Make time to do stuff that doesn’t scale! This is a wonderful example of how asking questions — and making time to reply to readers — has directly led to revenue for one newsroom.
- I always love seeing stories from publishers who are putting audience engagement at the center of their newsletter strategy. Here are three stories this month that you might want to bookmark:
- What’s New in Publishing wrote about The Local, a European newsroom that’s made asking questions of readers a focal point of their daily newsletters.
- Kelsey Ryan, founder and publisher of Kansas City’s The Beacon, wrote a blog post about all the different ways, from surveys to community listening sessions, they’ve learned what readers really want.
- Emily Goligoski, executive director of audience research at The Atlantic, talked about how research led to that newsroom identifying five key needs of their readers, which they try to put front and center when building products like newsletters.
- If you’re thinking about trying this sort of thing with your own newsletter, this Newsletter Strategy Positioning Doc might help! I’ve listed a few dozen reader needs — or as I usually refer to them, jobs to be done — on page 2 as examples to help you get started.
- Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection went live four months ago. So what have we learned?
- MPP adoption isn’t quite as high as you’d expect. Litmus’s December report says 57% of the market is using Apple Mail — but just 41% of those users have MPP turned on. A report from Sparkpost confirmed those numbers, and suggested that most of the users who will turn on MPP have already done so.
- Most of my Inbox Collective clients are seeing a lift in opens, somewhere in the 10-20% range. It’s a big jump, but it hasn’t rendered open rates useless.
- One exception: I’m seeing a handful of sites that cover tech who have experienced much higher jumps in open rates. That doesn’t surprise me — I’d expect that the audience that reads daily tech coverage is also more likely to quickly download a new operating system and use its new features.
- At this point, I’d recommend a few steps for dealing with MPP:
- 1) Make sure you’re communicating open rate changes to advertisers. If you’re selling based on CPM/opens, maybe start using an estimated rate (with the inflated opens removed) instead of what your ESP is telling you.
- 2) Survey your audience to get a sense of what they like about your newsletter and what you can do better. (A few ideas for questions are on page 4 of last month’s doc.)
- 3) Utilize tools outside your ESP to track email success! A few good resources:
- Google Analytics dashboards for newsletters — Two dashboards you can implement to track newsletter success (one to track real-time data, one to track monthly data).
- The Audience Explorer dashboard — A set of 10 custom reports for Google Analytics, including a dashboard for newsletters. (The Audience Explorer dashboards are also available in Spanish.)
- Google News Initiative Data Tools — Several free resources to help news organizations measure success (for email and other channels).
- Oracle’s Chad S. White wrote a piece for CMSWire about the dos and don’ts for handling email unsubscribes. As Chad mentioned here: While no one wants to lose a subscriber, allowing someone to unsubscribe is a far better option than having them ignore your emails or mark your emails as spam, both of which can have significant impact on your email deliverability.
- Good stuff here from Sean Tinney on the Aweber blog: 9 Tips to Win Back Lost Sales with Abandoned Cart Emails.
- You can always make your newsletter landing pages better. Check out these tips from Rob Hope of EmailOctopus — I’m betting there are one or two things in here that you could try on your landing pages.
- Nic Newman’s annual 2022 predictions for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism are out, and it’s always worth a read. In particular, I was happy to see the inclusion of writer-driven collectives — think outlets like Defector, Every, or Puck — where groups of writers band together to form a publication. Newman predicts that we’ll see more independent newsletter writers form similar partnerships, and I think he’s right. (Trying to be a solo writer can be tough! But working with others, and sharing key resources, like editing or accounting, might give writers a better combination of freedom and structure.)
- One more interesting number from the report: 70% of newsrooms surveyed said they’ll put more resources into newsletters in 2022.
- Good stuff here from Anangsha Alammyan on the Swapstack blog about how 1440 grew their audience by advertising in other newsletters.
- Full disclosure: I work with 1440 through Inbox Collective.
- On the note of data and privacy: A group of U.S. lawmakers are proposing a bill to overhaul the way companies show you their terms of service agreements. The name of the bill? The TLDR Act.
- Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw dug into an interesting question: Why hasn’t there been a breakout podcast hit for several years? Two reasons: 1) There are more podcasts than ever, and 2) Discovering new podcasts is hard. And it’s worth noting: The issues that podcasts face are very similar to the ones that newsletters face today. (If anything, podcast discovery is a bit easier — platforms like Apple and Spotify do a lot to help surface new shows for users.)
- One difference, though: I think monetization through email is a bit more straightforward than through podcasts. While podcast monetization is still mostly built around advertising, newsletters creators deploy a variety of tactics, from reader revenue (subscription, membership, donation) to direct sales (books, workshops, classes) to offerings like consulting. There are also podcasts that use these strategies, and do well with them, but email monetization is a few steps ahead of where podcasting is.
- (Of course, I’m horribly biased when it comes to newsletters! If you’ve got $0.02 to share on the topic, email me at dan@inboxcollective.com. I always love hearing new perspectives on topics like these!)
Stuff I Loved This Month
- The team at beehiiv, a new ESP, launched Pollinate, a tool that allows you to use Twitter’s subscribe feature and connect it to Mailchimp, MailerLite, ConvertKit, and Ghost. (FWIW: Twitter has their own ESP, Revue, and to set this up, you’ll need to first set up a Revue account, though you wouldn’t have to send any newsletters from it.)
- If you’re looking to promote your work on a podcast but aren’t sure where to start, check out PodcastWise, a directory of millions of podcasts, with details about who to contact if you’d like to appear on their show.
- I love when newsrooms take readers behind the scenes — and particularly when they do so in a regular email series to readers. For inspiration, take a look at the Guardian’s Inside the Guardian series, which wound down in December after six years and more than 250 stories.
- My very first boss, Jan Boyd, is writing a lovely newsletter about working in digital news. Do check out one of her first posts, which really resonated with me: How do you manage being the first person in a role?
- The team behind the website Marketing Examples has a new project out, called Copywriting Examples. Lots of good examples in there to learn from.
This Month in Mel Brooks Quotes That Are Also Good Rules to Follow for Email Marketing
For three years, in every Not a Newsletter, I’ve closed it by writing about a Google Docs animal. But after three years, I’m starting to run out of animals to write about. And digging up new, random facts about cheetahs and koalas is getting old. To quote the immortal Madeline Kahn in “Blazing Saddles”: “Let’s face it, I’m tired.”
So I want to try something new in 2022. Over the holidays, I read Mel Brooks’ fantastic new autobiography, “All About Me!”, and I had a realization: Mel’s life and movies have a surprising amount of advice that apply to the work that all of us do in email.
In lieu of a Google Docs animal, I want to introduce a new feature here at Not a newsletter: Mel Brooks Quotes That Are Also Good Rules to Follow for Email Marketing! This month, let’s turn to the wisdom of “Spaceballs”:
Lord Dark Helmet: What the hell am I looking at? When does this happen in the movie?
Col. Sandurz: Now. You’re looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now is happening now.
Lord Dark Helmet: What happened to then?
Col. Sandurz: We passed it.
Lord Dark Helmet: When?
Col. Sandurz: Just now. We’re in now now.
Lord Dark Helmet: Go back to then!
Col. Sandurz: When?
Lord Dark Helmet: Now!
Col. Sandurz: Now?
Lord Dark Helmet: Now!
Col. Sandurz: I can’t!
Lord Dark Helmet: Why?
Col. Sandurz: We missed it!
Lord Dark Helmet: When?
Col. Sandurz: Just now!
Lord Dark Helmet: When will then be now?
Col. Sandurz: Soon.
Email moves slowly. When I start working with a new client, I often tell them: The direction you’re headed is more important than how fast you get there. Testing out a new idea, launching a new product, building the right team — these things all take time. We all want things to move quickly, but email doesn’t really work that way.
Be patient, and put in the work. The things you want to do may not happen today, but they’ll happen. Soon.
That’s all for this edition! Want to be notified when next month’s edition of Not a Newsletter is live? Sign up here:
